New years is always an interesting time. Everyone seems to be self-assessing their lives. Employers and companies review the numbers from the past year. Then everyone looks to the future. What can I do differently? What do I want to change this year?
My New Years brought more change and self-assessment than I could ever imagine. So I thought I would share some of my realizations and hopes for the future with all of you!
1. Very few people know you. Like all of you. Most people know you only by who are you in relation to them. As a cousin, a co-worker, a daughter, a roommate, or a friend. Their knowledge of you is often constrained by the interactions you have with them and often affected by the expectations they have of your relationship.
For example, people that know me only through acro know me in such a different way than friends I’ve met through work. Yet neither group could tell you how much of an avid reader I am like my roommates in college or my sister (who I once accidentally ditched because I got so lost in a book in Barnes and Noble.)
Or those friends that see the monotone and stoic version of me that don’t get to see that version of me that cries and spends hours verbaling processing my life.
God is the only being that truly knows your heart. Knows the intention of your actions not just how it comes across. Knows when you’re acting like nothing is wrong or when something’s very wrong but you’ve already come to terms with it.
2. I thought I was about to enter a season of life where change was even more constant. 11 countries in 11 months? That’s a lot of moving and travel. Little did I know but all of that change was going to come a lot sooner than I thought. In December my ex-roommate made it clear that for multiple reasons, I was no longer welcome there. I thought I had secured a place for the next four months but that fell through just days before. I entered the new year with most of my things in my car and spend the first 4 days of the new year on a different couch each night.
While I am extremely blessed in a bountiful amount of friendships that have offered their homes to me in the short term but have yet to find a long term solution.
3. Test or a temptation. Since I decided to go on this trip in October my life has been flipped upside down. One thing after another so much that its hard not to focus solely on what’s going wrong even though there are still things going right. The phrase when it rain’s it pours didn’t even apply. It didn’t just pour, it was the middle of a hurricane. Little stuff mixed in with the big stuff. A dead car battery on my way to see a potential apartment. Lack of fundraising time because I was trying to figure out how to live out of my car. A falling out with a friend in the middle of my mom’s hospitalization. I began to question my own actions. What am I am doing wrong?
But after many prayers and conversations with friends, it hit me. How could I have been so silly to think I could decide to go on a trip like this and God wouldn’t prepare my heart. To really evaluate where I put my energy, how I deal with stress, and to remove toxic relationships from my life. I assumed that the hard parts of the trip would be when I was in a conversation in SE Asia with those who were sold into the sex traffic industry or leaving behind an orphanage in Africa that I had worked with all month. I didn’t think about the months leading up to the trip. To get made fun of for my faith by those who don’t believe in LA, to get so behind on fundraising that I question whether I am supposed to go, to get called selfish as I juggle to put out the fires erupting in my life.
Nothing has changed and many things are up in the air. But I am confident that God will reveal himself incredible ways this year. That my heart and mind will grow in ways I can’t even imagine and that this trip couldn’t have come at a better time.
Please keep the next few months of preparation in your thoughts and prayers. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
